Archives

Meta

Fairfield – Osborn – Fairborn

Before there was Fairborn, Ohio, there were the neighboring towns of Fairfield and Osborn. The town of Osborn was located in the area more recently occupied by a gravel pit and the Skyborn drive-in theatre, just off OH-235. After the 1913 Flood, the Miami Conservancy District developed a series of dams for flood prevention, one of which was the Huffman Dam on the Mad River. Osborn was located within the flood plain that would be created by this dam, and so many of the town’s buildings were moved 1.5 miles east by the Osborn Removal Company in the 1920s, in order to save them. The new location for the town of Osborn was just east of its neighbor Fairfield, in an area bounded by Wright Avenue on the west, Xenia Drive on the north, the railroad tracks on the east, and Dayton Drive on the south (the area where downtown Fairborn and the Fairborn public library are now). In the early 1950s, the towns of Fairfield and Osborn officially merged to form what we now know as Fairborn.

More information can be found in these resources at Wright State University Special Collections & Archives: